Ok, urban detectives: somebody out there may know what these fragments are?
Another favorite place I have in our corner of the city is Millenium Park, the rewarding but not overly-prettified piece of rescued riverland scrub along an upstream bend of the Charles River near the VFW Parkway. This undramatic wetland, long snubbed and left aisde for graveyards, DPW storage, a dump, and the backyard of the Irish Alehouse, got rescued a few decades ago, and turned into a really well-thought out park and the home grounds of West Roxbury High, as well.
It retains an air of strangeness, if you feel it. Exit through one wooded side, and you can wander into the grounds holding a few fragments of the long-vanished Transcendentalist commune called Brooke Farm, where Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller and their pals messed incompetently around at idealized rural living. Away along one of the graveyard drives is an old marker stating that Civil War troops long ago trained in what were open fields. Follow other paths, and you can wander through Gethsemane and several other miles of abutting graveyards. Over there, a train bridge, and the commuter rail carrying business people headed down town. The other way, Route 1 and a couple of miles of McDonald's, Bed Bath and Beyond, and discount carpetlands. That way, the top of the Blue Hill. Another way, the distant ice of the Hancock Tower.
Some time back, I noticed while jogging one of the wooded paths at the edge of the park some corners and edges of large, broken bits of sculpture poking out of the riverbank, mostly obscured by underbrush and wetland mush. I assumed they might be part of some grave marker or tomb, incautiously placed too close to the river, and eventually washed downstream. Or maybe even the smashed up work of vandals, carried hither in drunken rowdyism.
But recently a lot of that underbrush has been cleared away, and you can see the pieces better. One holds the Indian and shield of the Massachusetts state seal. On another, a shapely but blank-faced seated figure works carefully at a bench: there's a bull's head, what looks like rolls of material and tiny tools, and in big letters, the word LEATHER. Another piece, further into the undergrowth, seems to show other men at work at the big cog wheels of machines or mills.
What did these belong to, I wonder? Some busted-up monument to working men, back when industry was a source of pride and prosperity? One of the many fraternal societies of the working man that folks used to scrape together a little mutual assistance? Maybe an old technical school or training institute? Part of this river bank was long a landfill, so maybe these fragements came here by dumptruck and not the river.
I looked on the Park website, and their description is stately and staid, but without details on this castaway monument:
Description:
As its name indicates, Dump Shoreline Urban Wild spans the eastern flank of the now capped Gardner Street Landfill or Millenium Park. The site was utilized as a dumping ground for organic materials generated by the Parks and Recreation Department. Thus, although the area originally must have hosted a silver maple floodplain forest, the filled land now consists of an increasing number of woody plants. Located along the banks of the Charles River, this urban wild has been partially restored and incorporated into the new Millenium Park. During construction of Millenium Park, some debris was cleared from the site and a stonedust trail was established along the water's edge. The majority of the new Millenium Park is covered with grasses and sparse woody vegetation; however, the urban wild area provides a glimpse of the habitat that once stretched all the way across the landfill to the DCR's Brook Farm. Although the habitat of the urban wild has been significantly altered by past dumping, restoration projects can be undertaken to re-establish the wetland habitat
Whatever those restoration projects are, will they leave the solitary leatherman tooling away at his bench, under the trees? The mills of Massachusetts are long gone, mostly, the red brick towns they fueled struggling to turn old factories into museums and lofts, and high-tech, with its brains and screens, has replaced the giant cog wheels in the engine of the economy.
On the riverbank, blackbirds call and geese float by and hawks circle overhead, and people take their dog for a poop and a run, or sprint to soccer matches, or take kids to the well-kept playground. It's not such a bad place to rest, and a good place to see the city from a different angle.
